last100 » Pandora

Roku launches app store for its set-top box – adds Flickr, Facebook, Pandora and others

Steve O'Hear — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 10:53:48 +0000

Roku’s $100 set-top box (U.S.-only) just got even more compelling. The company has launched its own app store of sorts – called the ‘Channel Store’ – that brings a growing number of third-party content sources to the device including Pandora (music streaming) Facebook photos, Flickr (photo sharing), along with FrameChannel, Mediafly’s podcast directory, Revision3 and more. Dave Zatz over at Zatz Not Funny has a few screen grabs and a nifty walk-through video (embedded above). The new content ‘widgets’ join existing partnerships with Netflix, Amazon VOD, and MLB.TV.

Of course, everybody is jumping on the app store or “I want to be a platform game” and it’s a smart move for Roku to do so too. But they are far from the first set-top box to ‘open up’ and go down the app store route. Vudu already has its Rich Internet Application (RIA) Platform, which enables third-parties to extend the device’s content offerings, and Boxee, while not officially on a set-top box yet (coming soon), also has its own Internet TV-oriented app store.

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Napster tries again, unlimited streaming and five downloads for $5 per-month

Steve O'Hear — Mon, 18 May 2009 14:14:53 +0000

Napster tries again

Now under the stewardship of Best Buy, Napster is taking yet-another-stab at offering a compelling music service since its glorious P2P days of yesteryear. This time round the company is touting the combination of unlimited streaming of its 7 million strong music library in combination with 5 DRM-free downloads per month, all for a monthly subscription of just five dollars. “Music fans now have the best of both worlds”, boasts the press release.

While that’s a bit of an exaggeration to say the least, Napster’s new offering doesn’t seem like such a bad deal at all. Essentially, you’re committing to buying 5 tracks per-month at average industry prices, with the company throwing in its streaming service for “free”. There is as always a potential deal breaker depending on how you like to consume your music. Device support for the streaming part of the service is, for now at least, quite limited: PC streaming through a standard web browser and possibly, though I can’t be sure, home audio systems, such as those from Sonos and Logitech (Squeezebox). In other words, there’s no support for streaming through mobile phones and other portable devices. If there were a Napster app for iPhone, for example, that might be worth paying the five dollars for alone.

Mobile support in general is an essential component if we’re ever to be persuaded to move to a cloud-based model whereby our music collection resides on remote servers and is only accessible through the Internet. That’s something that competing services such as Pandora, Slacker, Last.fm and soon Spotify, already acknowledge.

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Voodoo Chile: Pandora lands on Vudu set-top box

Steve O'Hear — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 14:55:16 +0000

No longer a ‘one trick pony’, Vudu’s ambition to become a fully-fledged platform, capable of pulling in content from a range of third-party services, appears to be bearing fruit.

Today the company announced that owners of its set-top box now have access to Internet radio service Pandora. Features include support for multiple Pandora accounts, “enabling every member of the family to play his or her own personalized Pandora stations”, along with the ability to create custom stations and tweak them dynamically by thumbing tracks up or down.

Pandora, along with existing support for YouTube, Flickr, Picasa and others, comes courtesy of Vudu’s Rich Internet Application (RIA) Platform, which aims to make it easy for third-party developers to add new functionality to the company’s range of set-top boxes. While not yet available to the wider developer community, Vudu has pledged to fully open up its RIA Platform later this year, a move that should spur access to all manner of free content.

Dave Zatz, over at Zatz Not Funny, also reports on Vudu’s upcoming media extender functionality. Dubbed ‘Home Movies’, it looks like Vudu owners will soon be able to stream video content stored locally on their PCs, making the Vudu set-top box increasingly resemble the ‘open’ AppleTV I called for as long back as mid 2007!

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Last.fm now streaming on Squeezebox

Steve O'Hear — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 20:09:29 +0000

We’re big fans of Logitech’s line of Squeezebox streaming audio devices, and today the company announced that it had partnered with Last.fm to add the social music service to its existing bevy of online streaming options.

Owners of the Logitech Squeezebox Duet (see our coverage), Squeezebox Classic or the high-end Transporter network music systems who are based in the U.S., UK or Germany will be able to access Last.fm’s music catalog through their home stereo systems. Users will be able to listen to Last.fm Internet radio stations based on artist or genre, as well as stream personalized stations created based on their listening habits — thanks to Last.fm’s “scrobbling capability” which debuted on Squeezebox earlier this year.

In a written statement Martin Stiksel, Last.fm Co-Founder, said, “It’s something of a milestone to be offering the Last.fm streaming music experience for the first time on a hardware device, and we’re pleased to be reaching that milestone with Logitech. Last.fm is now no longer limited to your computer, and this marks another step toward giving music fans access to Last.fm’s unparalleled music services anywhere and everywhere they go.”

Also see: Pandora on your mobile and in your living room

While Logitech’s Robin Selden is quoted as saying: “Now users can create custom radio stations and playlists from any of the audio tracks in Last.fm’s music library and thanks to Logitech’s network music systems, people can enjoy that music anywhere in their home.”

Last.fm isn’t the first online music service to land on Squeezbox, which already supports Pandora, Rhapsody and Slacker.

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Where do you get your recommendations on the Web? From a service like The Filter? Or from friends?

Daniel Langendorf — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 03:56:12 +0000

It’s hard to fault Peter Gabriel’s logic: We are overwhelmed by the amount of information and choice we have on the Web. But is his solution — a recommendation engine called The Filter — really the answer?

Of course Gabriel, the genius behind the British rock band Genesis and the solo artist who gave us such tunes as “Solsbury Hill,” “Exposure,” and “Games Without Frontiers,” thinks so as he and England’s Eden Ventures have invested $8 million in The Filter. They believe people are overwhelmed by the Web and can’t find good content because it’s buried out of sight.

“When you drown people in an ocean of information, you’ve got to give them navigation tools,” Gabriel told News.com. “I know that there is better stuff out there than what I generally am exposed to . . . So if I have a sort of intelligent ally working with me 24 hours a day, I think I have a much better chance of getting stuff that will entertain, excite, and inspire me.”

The Filter, originally launched as a music recommendation service about a year ago in Europe, re-launched today in private beta as a more complete solution. It will be available to the public sometime in May.

But there’s something about The Filter that bugs me. What separates The Filter from any of the other algorithm-based recommendation engines out there, whether a human is a part of the process or not — Amazon, iTunes, lastFM, Netflix, Imeem, Digg, Pandora, and many more?

Founders say The Filter’s recommendation engine is more sophisticated than competitors because it doesn’t rely on the ratings that people have assigned to songs, albums, movies, or books. It determines user recommendations by observing what they do with these on the Internet.

To get the full power of The Filter, users can download its software to their desktop, where it watches and digests various streams of Internet behavior — what you buy at iTunes, what songs you sample at MySpace, what video you stream, your browsing history, to name a few. To use The Filter, however, you don’t have to rely on the desktop client.

Users also can connect with friends and track their media-consuming behavior.

The Filter takes this learned behavior, mixes in its algorithms, and generates highly targeted and personalized recommendations for not only what they think you might like but also what you are in the mood for at a particular time.

I don’t know at any given moment if I will stick with what’s playing now — Melody Gardot’s “Worrisome Heart” — or if I will switch to Modest Mouse, Miles Davis, or Phronesis in the next five minutes, so how will The Filter know?

But I digress.

A compelling alternative to algorithm-based recommendation engines is people-powered search, something that entrepreneur Jason Calacanis is shouting about from the rooftops with his human-powered search engine, Mahalo.

Both algorithm and people-power introduce bias — the ones who wrote wrote the algorithm (in this case for The Filter) or the actual humans hired by Calacanis to generate Mahalo content. In both cases, I don’t necessarily distrust the brainiacs or the folks dedicated to bringing me the absolute best the Web has to offer on Ambre Lake, the winner of “Rock of Love 2.” But I don’t know these people, either.

Who I do know are those in my Social Information Network. Family. Friends. Friendly strangers. Co-workers. The dude who runs the local coffee shop. Even friends of my 13-year-old kid.

Lately, I’ve added my extended social network of Facebook and Twitter into my SIN. I may not know @amyguth, @thebuffster, or @Bwana personally, but I do have a better sense of them, their likes and dislikes, than I do anonymous algorithm writers because I choose to let them into my life by following their lives.

So when it comes to The Filter, it’s just another service, another tool, another data point that I can check in on and see what’s there. I’ve found great music on Pandora and lastFM. And, once I either get my invite or the public floodgates open, I expect to find some cool stuff through The Filter.

But aren’t all these recommendation services — there’s so many of them out there these days — just adding to the noise, albeit in a different manner?

I mostly find great information and content through my personal social information network, through people like @therefore, @academicdave, @nicholasspencer, and @stevegillmor on Twitter. I suspect you do, too.

In fact, it’s time to check out M83. Thanks @nicholasspencer.

Additional coverage: Fortune, New York Times, and Silicon Alley Insider.

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